Comparison With Zero Energy Buildings
A net zero-energy building (ZEB) is a building that over a year does not use more energy than it generates. The first 1979 Zero Energy Design building used passive solar heating and cooling techniques with air-tight construction and super insulation. A few ZEB’s fail to fully exploit more affordable conservation technology and all use onsite active renewable energy technologies like photovoltaic to offset the building's primary energy consumption. Passive House and ZEB are complementary synergistic technology approaches, based on the same physics of thermal energy transfer and storage: ZEBs drive the annual energy consumption down to 0 kWh/m² from the already low PassivHaus criteria of 120 kWh/m² with help from on-site renewable energy sources. Energy Plus houses are similar to both PassivHaus and ZEB but emphasize the production of more energy per year than they consume, e.g., annual energy performance of -25 kWh/m² is an Energy Plus house.
Read more about this topic: Passive House
Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison, energy and/or buildings:
“From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“It is comparison than makes people miserable.”
—Chinese proverb.
“The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)